so a common claim I see made is that arch is up to date than Debian but harder to maintain and easier to break. Is there a good sort of middle ground distro between the reliability of Debian and the up-to-date packages of arch?

  • @[email protected]
    -4•6 hours ago

    Arch is not harder to maintain nor is it easier to break, that’s a myth. If anything, it’s the opposite, as a rolling release stays up to date, though it relies on the user keeping it up to date. If you get lazy with updates, then yes, you are going to have problems eventually.

    • @yoevliEnglish
      4•6 hours ago

      I hate when people insist that Arch isn’t easier to break. There was an incident a couple of years ago where a Grub update was rolled out that required that grub-mkconfig be re-run manually, and if you failed to do this the system would brick and you’d need to fix it in a recovery environment. This happened to my laptop while I was on vacation, and while I had luckily had the foresight to bring a flash drive full of ISOs, it was a real pain to fix.

      Yes, Arch offers a lot more stability than people give it credit for, but it’s still less reliable than the popular point-release distros like Fedora or Ubuntu, and there’s not really any way around that with a rolling-release model. As someone who is at a point in life where I don’t always have the time nor energy to deal with random breakage (however infrequently), having the extra peace of mind is nice.

      • @[email protected]
        1•44 minutes ago

        And I hate when people take a single case and extrapolate it as a general statement.

        By that argument Ubuntu is equally unstable as they have rolled out updates that broke grub resulting in unbootable systems - not during a full distro upgrade, but as Ubuntu specific patches to LTS.

        In the end, we have choice, and choice is a good thing.